Whether you are creating a new brand or refreshing an old brand, your brand strategy, story and marketing strategy is one of the most important steps you will take in building your organisation. Your brand should give your product or company a unique personality, communicate your point of difference, attract the brightest and best people and be compelling to your target audience.

At BrandMatters, our belief is that strong brands sit at the intersection of strategic insight and creative magic. Our team have been creating Australia’s strongest brands for decades (Paul Nelson – BM’s head honcho has been in the game for longer than he wishes to admit) with experience across a range of industries, including FMCG, Financial Services, Education and Fintech.

In some cases our clients come to us with a brand conundrum, a brand that just isn’t cutting through or a brand that fails to talk to the target audience.

In other cases they come to us with nothing at all – we love brand creation, we live and breath brands and the idea of giving birth to a brand excites us to no end.

Choosing the right brand agency to work with can be a challenge; you need to consider your budget, but you should also feel comfortable that the agency is the right fit from a vision and values perspective.

As a brand agency, our values are front and centre in everything we do. A focus on listening, empathy, delivery, respect and growth is what makes working with us unique. And we wouldn’t be an agency worth our salt if we didn’t ensure these values weave their way through everything we do.

We have developed a methodology which is based on reducing complexity, maximising stakeholder engagement, ensuring alignment with your business objectives - and of course achieving results.

It see’s us turn data into insights, vision into a brand and messaging into marketing strategies that stand out for our clients.

1. Consult

During this phase we focus to understand your business – including your business goals, marketing objectives, market, customer and competitors. Our aim is to clearly define and articulate your challenge – by not only mining the opinions of your team but also your customers, stakeholders and partners. This indepth research and insight gathering process is the key to the success of the subsequent phases.

But it’s not just the data that we gather, through a specialist approach to quant and qual research – but our ability to turn this data into insights. That’s because we innately understand why people do what they do (ourselves included), and so we are able to share with you the fundamental truth of why your audience behave the way they do towards your business.

Every client is different and this phase can range from desk research to indepth interviews, brand tracking, qualitative and quantitative research. We will recommend the most effective mix of research to uncover the sights required to get the brand strategy right.

2. Create

During this phase we create your brand strategy. We incorporate the brand insights uncovered in phase 1, along with our experience, industry benchmarking and of course creativity to craft your brand positioning – a definition of your uniqueness in the market place – your brand positioning will help you have a clearer picture of what your brand should communicate – at every touch point.

From here, you can choose to go deeper, defining your brand architecture if you are planning on taking to market multiple offers, and the communications tools that express your point of difference consistently, in a way that resonates with your audience.

As part of this phase, we also make recommendations on the naming of your brand, or renaming, or rebranding if required. In terms of your brand identity, our senior designers will use the knowledge gained from the strategic insights and brand positioning to inspire development of a new visual identity. This includes logos, colour palettes, graphic devices, typography and image libraries. This is where your unique positioning will start to feel real, as strategic rigour and creative excellence combine.

3. Express

In this phase, we will help you bring your brand to life with consistency as the key. We express it visually, verbally and experientially, across all touchpoints and channels. We develop your brand stationery, website, templates and any other communications collateral.

To ensure consistent application of your brand, we develop comprehensive brand guidelines for employees, suppliers and partners. We can also develop your go-to-market strategy and execute campaigns for your customers and employees.

While we believe phase 1 and 2 are important – a winning strategy would be nothing if it was not implemented or executed with excellence. Tracking the success of the activity and brand health is also an important part of this phase – with tracking you can enable your brand strategy to be agile – learning from experience and improving along the way. Your brand will hold incredible value over time, if nurtured and respected.

There are many agencies out there – some specialise in digital marketing, some in coming up with creative concepts. Our speciality is insight driven, strategic brand development and execution. Get in touch so we can discuss your situation and show you how our guiding principles to brand creation can help you grow your brand into your most valuable asset.